Posted
by
timothy
on Monday November 19, 2012 @01:14AM
from the my-android-phone-freezes-way-too-often dept.

symbolset writes "As reported on The Verge, many people are experiencing freezing, rebooting and battery problems on their new Windows Phone 8 devices. This WP8Central thread shows many of the issues. Affected devices include Lumia 920 and HTC 8X." Every phone and every OS has its problems, and happy users probably aren't as vocal; it would be good to know how Windows Phone users who are also iOS and Android users compare them for reliability.

I've had an iPhone4S, a couple of Androids (Samsuck, HTC) and a Windows Mobile 7 phone (HTC).

Outside of the Samsungs, they've all been exceptionally stable. Apple has the best ecosystem, but IMO is the least user friendly. Android is probably the most user friendly, but tries to be too similar to a desktop system, and feels slightly clunkly. Windows Mobile 7 has a horribly poor selection of apps, almost as user friendly as Android and has a fairly smooth design for mobile setups. Playing with Windows 8 on a desktop, I doubt much has changed, but given the ravamp of the OS, I wouldn't consider buying a phone with it for at least a few months to a year yet, at minimum. Stick with Android.

The only system I've had anywhere similar a reboot experience as you described was on the Samsung Androids (one was a Transform, the other was the replacement model for a Transform).

Marketing and cognitive dissonance. Also, some people are using the well marketed (but crap) or cheap (and crap) android phones, and think that is the standard.

I'd personally take a Windows Mobile 7 phone over and Android or iOS, but wouldn't actually recommend it to others (works for my uses, but wouldn't work for most people's uses).I'd recommend others get a *good* Android (more apps, more of what most people would want out of a smartphone).

I call BULLSHIT sir! If you have nothing running then you will get more than a day per charge. If however you have everything running under the moon then yes you will not get much of a charge. But then again neither will you from Android, or any other phone. I have both Android and iOS phones and the reality is that you need to turn crap off or target what you want running and what you don't. I can usually get about 3 to 4 days out of a charge and that is with email, and notifications running.

I know I took it to a habit to hibernate my windows machine about four years ago because it doesn't really crash anymore. No need to reboot for any other reason then windows update requiring system restart to apply some updates.

As I pointed above, XP SP3 is pretty much in the same boat. It almost never crashes and only needs to be restarted when updates require it to.

No idea on mobile windows though, never really used it long enough to form an opinion. Longest time I got to play with WP7/8 was an hour or so messing around with a friend's phone to notice that had less features important to me than my positively ancient nokia 5230.

You and I understand the subtle nuances of your post, the tradeoffs between this potential use and that other use, the tug and pull between the developer and the environment provider. You Microsoft ACs have grown quite good at sparring with me. But the end user doesn't have a micro givashit. He just wants to enjoy being empowered by the device to do stuff he couldn't do yesterday. And the stuff he cares about is first: to connect to his loved ones and his lesser loved ones. Second: to share his life with the aforementioned loved ones and any who might be interested. He could give a fuck less about APIs.

They told them they where going to give them windows on a phone. They bought windows on a phone. Random reboots, completely unstable, uses up all resources including battery, the only solution is to wipe it out and start over, and even then you end up with a broken device. Sounds like they managed to port the whole windows experience, I don't get the complains. Maybe it's the lack of a blue screen of dead that's bothering them?

I've had a Windows Phone (7 and then 7.5) and I think I can count the total number of reboots during that time on one hand. It's extremely stable, more so than any other smartphone or even feature phone I've ever owned. I'm excited to get a Windows Phone 8 (probably the 920) but it's a huge rewrite so I would expect a few quirks here and there at first.

As a matter of fact, the WP7 "emulator" in the built tools is really just an x86-compiled version of the OS running in a VM. I believe the same of the WP8 "emulator" as well. However, aside from the handful of pieces of assembly and other instruction-set-specific code in the kernels, there's nothing very special about being able to do that. In fact, both CE and NT already had x86 ports, so there's not much special about it at all.

On the other hand, CE and NT are very, very different at higher levels. Although both of them theoretically implement the Win32 API, you'll probably do better porting an app targeting Linux to OpenBSD, or possibly even something more exotic. Yes, they both use POSIX (the same way NT and CE both use Win32) but there's a ton of difference in the details. It may help that NT is close to a superset of CE (porting the reverse direction would be harder) but there's still going to be a fair bit of re-writing involved. CE doesn't really have a concept of user accounts, while they're integral to NT (WP7 had a sort of hacked-together permissions system bolted onto CE, but it bore no resemblance to the NT user account model). WinCE uses a modified FAT filesystem that I'm not even sure there's an NT driver for (it has file modes such as "INROM" which is an indelible read-only attribute, but you can "shadow" the file with a writable one...) while all recent WinNT-based systems use NTFS. CE has a single-rooted filesystem (at least, at the user level) with no drive letters; NTFS has a single-rooted filesystem at the device level, and a DOS-style multi-rooted filesystem at the user level. CE has a bunch of APIs for dealing with things like "CEDB" (CE database) files and mobile functionality, while such things have never been part of NT and would have to either be implemented for it, or the WP7 code that relied on them would have to be re-written. NT drivers and services work differently from CE ones.

I'm sure a lot of code was re-written. Probably nowhere near all of it, but definitely a lot.

On the other hand, CE and NT are very, very different at higher levels. Although both of them theoretically implement the Win32 API, you'll probably do better porting an app targeting Linux to OpenBSD, or possibly even something more exotic. Yes, they both use POSIX (the same way NT and CE both use Win32) but there's a ton of difference in the details. It may help that NT is close to a superset of CE (porting the reverse direction would be harder) but there's still going to be a fair bit of re-writing involved.

I used to develop a codebase that worked on both Windows Mobile and the desktop. If you targeted the common subset of Win32, MFC, or ATL/WTL, didn't assume your file paths start with "C:" (which is a bad assumption anyway), and optionalized the platform-exclusive stuff, it was quite OK. There were some annoying quirks on CE, for example, no two DLLs in your process could have the same file name. Maybe the right way was to start on CE or both, then making it work everywhere wasn't that difficult.

Looks like you confuse some things here... from Wikipedia:
Windows CE is a distinct operating system and kernel, rather than a trimmed-down version of desktop Windows.[6] It is not to be confused with Windows Embedded Standard which is an NT-based componentized version of desktop Microsoft Windows.

2012 is already the year of Linux on the desktop. And the desktop is in your pocket. Android/Linux moved more devices last quarter than Windows devices by a ratio of 3:2. Christmas is coming and by then it will be a clean sweep. By the final reports in February we will know that 2012 was the year that Linux came into its own.

If some want to cry "Waah! That's not fair! Mobile is not PC." Well suck it up sunshine. If you are a developer this is all that matters: these are the people who will buy your apps. If you make devices this is all that matters: these are the devices that move units. If you sell devices at retail this is all that matters: this is the stuff that doesn't grow dust on the shelf. People buy the devices with Android on over the devices with Windows on by a ratio of 3:2, and the first thing they do after they turn it on is buy apps and content. The only entity in all the world who cares to split this linguistic hair is Microsoft because they want to maintain the illusion that they are still king of this particular hill. But they are not. They don't own the word "PC" either, or it would be PC(R). There were PCs before Microsoft tried to take ownership of this word, and there will be PCs after we have forgotten their long sordid story. These devices are personal, and they compute. They are personal computers. Heck, some of them are more powerful than an early Cray supercomputer - in your pocket.

2012 is already the year of Linux on the desktop. And the desktop is in your pocket.

Sorry, but no and no.

Android is not Linux. It's a convenience fork of the Linux kernel and a few userland libraries, which did a lot to divert Linux development on mobile, because, yeah, Google is special and if it decides to fork a community-run project to suit its corporate needs, everybody should just follow. Not.

Android is not desktop. I can't use it to do serious work, or even write a good email. I use real desktop Linux for that. Sure, I could spend time to purchase a wireless keyboard and fiddle with

How much of your computing time do you spend on your mobile? Did you even write that comment on it? Mobile phones are taking some focus off the desktop/laptop PCs for sure but you're only kidding yourself if you think it's a replacement.

You need to re-read his comment. PC is an acronym for "personal computer," which a phone certainly is. A desktop computer is a PC, but a PC is not a desktop computer. A dog is a four legged animal, but a four legged animal is not a dog. A desktop is only one form of personal computer today, unlike fifteen years ago when PCs were all desktops. And as he points out, a phone is more powerful than the most powerful supercomputer that existed in 1970.

I agree that an Android device (or whatever competitor device you prefer) is not a replacement for your dev pc, but I'd wager that the vast majority of people who purchased PC before the explosion of smart phones did not use their PC like you or I. They used it for browsing the web, facebook, email, youtube, etc.

I'll also wager that the smart phones have most certainly replaced the PC for the vast majority of these users. Most PC owners used them to consume not create, and for that the smart phones and tabl

You have to admit that they have a history of giving us some damn good reasons to hate them. I was a huge MS supporter from Windows 3.1 up to Windows Vista. After using Windows Mobile and Vista, I realized that Microsoft lost it completely and made the switch (which wasn't something I was looking forward to doing, but now I'm glad that I did). I just got sick of things being so shitty all the time.

Jokes aside, Microsoft had to make the "perfect" phone to fight against iOS and Android. Perfect in a way that that kind of problem (freeze, reboot) doesn't happen - the interface itself is another story. These flaws demonstrate (again) how thick is MS management problem. Ballmer should never have tolerated a phone that buggy to be publicly sold.

But if they wait until it's perfect, then they lose even more mindshare to two very competitive rivals: The domestic US smartphone market is running out of fresh non-preferential users, while the existing user base seems to have binary polarization between Android and iOS in ways that earlier competition between Symbian/Palm/Nokia/Blackberry never produced.

It's a tough market to get into, just now, and the longer they wait the tougher it gets...

So I think that in order to succeed, MSFT has to balance timeliness (as above) vs. hardware (wait too long, and your hardware turns stale), vs. software perfection.

In other words, were MSFT to be perfect at any one of these at the detriment of the other, it would be a far stronger nail in the coffin than a balance of the three.

And to be very clear: Their competitor's products (iOS and Android) are also far from perfect.

The question then, as I see it, is this: Did they balance it correctly to capture enough marketshare to sustain further development?

I personally hope not, given the extraordinary oppressiveness and money-grabbing nature of the walled garden that is Windows 8 on non-x86 platforms (the nature of which was apparently tried-and-tested with the Xbox 360), but I guess we'll see.

adolf wrote "But if they wait until it's perfect, then they lose even more mindshare to two very competitive rivals."

Nobody said coming from behind to challenge two powerful incumbents would be easy. To challenge them, Microsoft must have an excellent strategy and execute that strategy almost perfectly. If the reports really indicate OS quality problems then Microsoft will fail this time around.

Microsoft has the cash to keep trying, but each failed attempt poisons their well a bit more. Windows Phone 12 might be clearly the best phone when it comes out, but perhaps nobody will care by then. Even their most rusted-on fans will have written them off already.

The Character, being part of the R-series of low-end CDMA devices destined for carriers such as MetroPCS and US Cellular runs Qualcomm's BREW operating system with TouchWiz Lite as the overlay. Samsung and Nokia never officially ported Symbian to CDMA, Samsung were never allowed to outside of Korea, per the terms of their previous deal with Nokia/Symbian Ltd and Nokia's hostile attitude towards Qualcomm on CDMA patent licensing prevented CDMA Symbian devices from being actively developed for the US.

My general policy towards gadgets is to only replace them when they've completely broken or when the cost of repair isn't worth it anymore. After all, why replace something that's still doing well what it's supposed to? My guess most Symbian users have a similar attitude.

So, only once my trusty PalmOS device gives up I'll look into whatever good is available and switch, not a moment earlier.

Considering most of the supporters of Microsoft (dare I say "fanboys") have REALLY high UID's or are anonymous cowards.... yes, it is hard to believe, and it is hard to understand why after all the years of abuse from the Linux/Apple crowd the Microsoft fans would continue to come in and spend most of their time defending their fanboyness to people who wouldn't use windows if it came with a blowjob from Selma Hayek.

it is hard to understand why after all the years of abuse from the Linux/Apple crowd the Microsoft fans would continue to come in and spend most of their time defending their fanboyness to people who wouldn't use windows if it came with a blowjob from Selma Hayek.

Considering most of the supporters of Linux/Apple (dare I say "fanboys") have REALLY high UID's or are anonymous cowards.... yes, it is hard to believe, and it is hard to understand why after all the years of abuse from the Microsoft crowd the Linux/Apple fans would continue to come in and spend most of their time defending their fanboyness to people who wouldn't use windows if it came with a blowjob from Selma Hayek.
See how that works?

Actually it doesn't since this place grew out of Rob Malda's linux and enlightenment window manager app pages, so that's a fairly epic fail above.The "you do too" arguments really should have been left behind when people were old enough that they couldn't easily fit in the sandpit to play with the other kindergarden children, which is why sleazy bastards in politics go for the premptive strike accusing their opponents of the flaws they demonstrate above. They know that any rational pointing out that the ac

Um, can't you see a pattern here: somebody fresh on Slashdot starts posting and quickly exposes opinions that are insufficiently anti-Microsoft. He gets barked at by a few zealots who point out his high UID as something that makes him deficient (I mean six digits, must be a total bandwagon jumper), then he gets modded down regardless of the validity of his comment. The person shrugs and leaves it to the neckbeards.

If that's what the majority of people here actually wants, fine. But then the motto should be "News for Linux neckbeards. Other stuff doesn't matter."

I haven't had a Windows Phone since 6.1(which was meh) but I do enjoy running Windows 8 on my desktop and have enjoyed almost every Windows version since Windows 95b except for ME(yes, even Vista). Is my UID low enough to be taken at face value?

Yeah, I still remember how I switched. I was trying to get Windows 95 to back up some files on my hard drive to tape using their goofy backup software. To make a long story short, Windows 95 ultimately ended up corrupting my hard drive and the backup. It was at that point that I switched to OS/2 for a while, then slackware, then redhat, then debian. I stuck with debian for a while, then switched to ubuntu and have been mostly ubuntu since. For a while I had a windows or OSX partition for games, but in

I'm definitely not an MS fanboy, but my opinion on Linux usability changed a bit over the past couple of years as well. I work (as I disclosed in some posts earlier) for Nokia and might be biased for that reason, and therefore also feel targeted by your claims. Still, I'm running Linux on my desktop and laptop at home, I didn't recommend WP7(.5) as an alternative for Android or iPhone for Power-Users (even though I might have recommended the UI), because I stick to my own opinion and I don't want to burn my reputation, here or elsewhere, out of wrong sense of loyalty to my employer. But I also couldn't recommend Android or iPhone, because my enthusiasm for Open Source is driven by my enthusiasm for people to own their own data and devices.

Windows Phone 8 is the first system I do recommend usability- and feature-wise as an alternative to Android or iOS. Since I was able to use a Lumia 820 for test purpose for some time, I can also claim that the stability is OK (Since I test versions under development, my experience might not match the consumer experience, but should be expected to be rather more unstable. Still, while it was not perfect yet I admit, it is quite good. I have some friends using Android and saw more reboots on their devices).

From a privacy point of view I still think, MeeGo would have been better because an Open Source System can be reviewed to check which data is transmitted to whom, but the WP8 concepts are still an improvement compared to Android or iPhone. And while Android might be theoretically open source, this argument is moot for a locked phone with pre-compiled version and closed source drivers in kernel space.

Since in WP8 each contact is associated to an account, the different accounts are never merged. That's the reason WP is afaik the first mobile phone system capable to properly manage multiple active sync accounts.
If I want contacts to be only on my phone, I just configure a fake account with invalid server name and associate contacts with this account => they will not be synchronized. Very simple, very straight-forward, but a hack; however, the new API should allow to implement a local phonebook which will be fully integrated in peoples hub without synchronizing it to any server. I'd expect such an app to be available soon, also I'm not particularly waiting for it. The better solution is to configure my own ActiveSync-Server. In my case it is Zarafa on Fedora17 and can be reached via dynamic dns name; if you can't have your computer online 24/7, setting it up at home and attaching it to a WLAN router is also a viable option.

Even though I do love the technical side of the N9 and was quite sad that the system was abandoned in favour of WP, I do understand the reasoning behind, and I also understand the decision to go for WP rather than Android, even though WP7 was not competitive enough and WP8 still a year away: It would have been quite difficult to establish Nokia Maps on Android in spite of the better map data and better feature sets, because Google is quite protective of their own services. (http://thisismynext.com/2011/05/12/google-android-skyhook-lawsuit-motorola-samsung/)

Gee, I've had two friends in the last week also report their iphone 5s locking up and freezing. Guess this is âoenewsâ as well. And oh, here's an Apple forum with ooo a whole 25 replies on it about the iphone 5 freezing.

So how bout some real comparisons here instead of cherrypicking? How bout a satisfaction survey of 920 owners? Maybe some real journalistic work perhaps? How bout numerically compare the satisfaction of 920 owners to the rest of the field? Too defensible? Too much work?

By stop hiring guns to artificially boost up your phone ratings at Amazon. Lumia 900 was a show case of robot reviews. When I am writing this, Lumia 920 has already received five reviews, all of them 5-star. All but one has written a review of another product other than Lumia 920.

I had a Motorola Milestone (international version of the original Droid) for a while, now running a Lumia 800. The Milestone would die at least once a day, and the battery would last maybe 10 hours if I left it completely alone. Even though the Milestone was a flagship Android phone at one point, I could write a giant TL;DR post about the problems I had with that phone.

My Lumia gets over 30 hours of battery on a single charge and has yet to crash or even do anything unexpected in the 6 months I've owned it. The difference in the quality of the phones is so night and day I can't imagine that a WP8 phone would be any worse than an Android.

You're comparing Motorola to Nokia. That's always going to come out favouring Nokia, as they've always been better at building phones. A Nokia Android phone would make a Motorola Windows phone look bad, too (if such things existed). Flagship means nothing - it was just the most expensive phone made by Motorola for a while. Motorola can easily make a shit phone expensive.

The days of Nokia having a meme associated with their quality of build are gone with their factories to china in part of Elops [continuing] cost cutting exercise.

Oh I'm under no illusion that the legendary Nokia quality of the '90s and early '00s will ever be back, but they've always been. I just said they're better than Motorola. I know that's not saying much, considering how bad Motorola phones have been at least as far back as the v2088.

I know that's not saying much, considering how bad Motorola phones have been at least as far back as the v2088.

I'd be very surprised if it what you are saying is true. The only phone I have ever seen break is my original iPhone which snapped at the dock. Even the cheapest phones are pretty study today [I think even the cheap materials have got better], and generally suffer either "design problems" like iPhones antenna/camera problems or OS problems like Windows has here, Android on the whole has seemed pretty immune, even Apple seem to clear their release problems up pretty quickly although its hard to tell they are

I had a Motorola Milestone (international version of the original Droid) for a while, now running a Lumia 800. The Milestone would die at least once a day, and the battery would last maybe 10 hours if I left it completely alone. Even though the Milestone was a flagship Android phone at one point, I could write a giant TL;DR post about the problems I had with that phone.

My Lumia gets over 30 hours of battery on a single charge and has yet to crash or even do anything unexpected in the 6 months I've owned it. The difference in the quality of the phones is so night and day I can't imagine that a WP8 phone would be any worse than an Android.

So, you are comparing an old smartphone with the latest one, and you don't see a problem in that?

Amusing.

Would you like to compare the reliability of your phone with my Nokia 3210?

It would be interesting to know the scope of the problem(s), and how to exercise the(se) bug(s).

I have had a Nokia Lumia 920 for just under a week now (replacing my year old Nokia Lumia 900) and have not noted any performance or battery-life related issues with it. Admittedly, I have not done that much with it yet, as I am still reloading applications onto it (an area which is keen for improvement), but I have to say it has worked consistently without problem.

I wonder if the problems are due to a specific application or manufacturer-applied configuration.

I've read reports where people have narrowed at least some battery churn to a buggy IMAP implementation when working with Google Mail. Maybe it's the GMail server doing something unexpected, but that's still a client bug.Others point at NFC. I haven't used WP8 yet to check.

Thanks to the joy of distance selling regulations, my wife has had her Lumia 920 returned. It, after a day, decided to freeze approximately 30 minutes after every power cycle. Not only that, the wireless charging doesn't work properly and the operating system is slightly clunky in places (moreso than windows phone 7.5 which tbh wasn't all that bad). It would be a good device if it wasn't for these issues. Oh and the music app is basically a large advertising platform. I've just dumped my Lumia 710 for a Nexus 4, which so far seems reasonable but not anything overly special. She has gone back to her Galaxy ace.

I've had a Windows Phone 7 phone, including the upgrade of the OS, it's required maybe that many restarts in the past 1.5 years - this is about the same over a given duration as my use of the iPhone4s while over seas, and as some of my friends with good Androids. A lot better than the two crap androids I've had.

Note: I'd actually recommend most people get a good Android phone over a Windows phone, but if you are going to criticize the phone, criticize it on it's flaws, it's got enough of them, don't try to invent shit.

On the other hand, my iPad had 49 Calendar items for every single Contact's birthday until I deleted every all accounts from Settings/Mail, Contacts, Calendars and started again late last week, so even the Great Apple(tm) isn't immune to issues.

Oh agreed, just for my usage (phone functions, maps, and messaging) my iphone 3GS worked fine. If I had the iphone 5 maps would be buggy right out the gate (alongside data usage apparently). There's a reason my current phone is a droid and not an iphone (a few actually). The only other bother is despite being a droid, since it only has MTP linux compatibility for syncing is pretty pathetic.

God It really was heavy. I think it was as much the keyboard as anything else. What surprised me with the flagshit windows phones, is unlike the n900 which felt a million dollars. It included a radio, a remote control, hell I could play my tunes through the radio [It was like living in the future], hell I had 48gb in mine then, and was a computer not an electronics device, but it suffered from a shitty screen [needed a note solution], and not enough memory. It was weird updating it to a new phone that was i

It's good that you're getting better battery life (the "one reboot" is a bit of a stretch), and "several weeks" seems funny since AT&T just started selling them on Nov. 11th. But glad you like your purchase. If you just come here to shill for Ballmer... well that's another story, isn't it?:)

The guts of a phone is ridicously complex. I worked for Symbian for ten years and we threw incredible amounts of resources and effort into testing and we still didn't catch all bugs.

Nobody wants to release a device with aggravating bugs. Be it Apple, Nokia or Samsung, they all really do want the best customer experience. Only an idiot would think otherwise. However, they have to release at some point, otherwise the market window is gone on a model they've typically worked on for a year.

No I would say the best features of Android, for me personally, is its incredibly first party Applications, maps; chrome being the ones I use most. I love the ability to customise my phone though the internet, both the play store, and my contacts. I love the widget layer, for both the live wallpapers and the widgets. I personally have a phone that includes joystick controls, so obviously a customisable OS by third party manufactures meant a lot to me;).